But over the years, his recipes, many of which rely on the south Indian flavoring “kokum,” made from the dried skin of the mangosteen fruit, have also incorporated a dash of feminism.

In “The Married Man’s Guide to Creative Cooking,” published in July, Mr. Halarnkar urges Indian men to do the unthinkable: Step into the kitchen. He started out promoting the book in the usual way – with cooking demonstrations and an appearance with a Bollywood star.

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But in recent weeks, possibly to the chagrin of his publisher Westland Ltd., Mr. Halarnkar has taken to giving a PowerPoint talk with slides on the depressing figures on women’s workforce participation in India – and how cooking is a metaphor for why women in India appear to have higher attrition rates than women in many other countries.

Most recently, Mr. Halarnkar gave the talk in New Delhi this week, to workers at an infrastructure company on Monday, and at a cultural center on Tuesday.

“Men aren’t stepping up,” Mr. Halarnkar said in response to a question from the audience at a talk on Tuesday night. “Women can join the workforce if they get a helping hand. Without any helping hand how can they possibly?”

Mr. Halarnkar said his work as a journalist – he was a managing editor at The Hindustan Times and still writes a regular column for the paper – shaped the cookbook and the talk. Tech firms in the southern city of Bangalore, where he lives with his wife and daughter, hire lots of women. But once the kids come along, it’s hard for many women to stay in their jobs, he says.

“I find this abhorrent, especially in a place like Bangalore, that droves of — thousands of — women are just dropping out of the workforce because their husbands don’t want to do too much at home,” said Mr. Halarnkar.

A 2011 survey of women’s presence at multinational firms in six Asian countries found that India showed the highest rate of dropping out. In India, women made up nearly 30% of junior employees, but just 15% of mid-level employees and less than 10% % of senior positions. Many women in India leave the workforce to take care of children and older relatives, research has showed.

He also realized that he was an anomaly, cooking about 10 meals a week, including breakfast each day for his wife, the editor of a weekend magazine, and daughter. He works from home, which helps. (His wife, who is present at the Tuesday talk, tells the audience, “I do a lot too.”

Illustration courtesy Westland Ltd.

The author believes that even without top-notch cooking equipment, a man can learn to produce delicious meals.

“Look at our advertisements, if there’s a successful working woman, she comes home, starts the LG washing machine,” said Mr. Halarnkar. “The husband also comes home and says, ‘What’s for dinner?’”

Mr. Halarnkar gets kudos – and some flak — from the audience at the cultural center. One man says that Mr. Halarnkar’s line that men need to lend their wives a “helping hand” implies that they don’t need to do half the housework, just a tiny bit more than they’re doing now.

A 2011 study by the U.S.-based International Center for Research on Women found that while men in the other five countries surveyed said that excluding childcare, they did half of household duties, in India men said they did just 16% of household chores.

One woman in the Tuesday night audience points out that household help is more inexpensive to hire in India than overseas, and asks if this means that in some ways Indian women have it easier than those in developed countries. Mr. Halarnkar is non-committal on that but says later in a phone interview that even in cases where families have help, women are still expected to run the house, do the shopping, plan menus and so on, as well as childcare when the nanny is not around, all of which adds up to quite a bit of work. The burden, in his view, needs to be shared.

Mr. Halarnkar says that he learned to cook and do household chores at a young age, when his mother, a physiotherapist, asked his brother and him to help with chopping vegetables and dusting. But he said it was never too late to start, pointing to the example of his father, a policeman, who was always working when he was growing up.

After retirement, though, his father began washing dishes, making tea in the morning for his wife, and doing sundry other chores, he says.

Plus, Mr. Halarnkar said at the talk, knowing how to cook can help men in unexpected ways. He claimed – although this account could not independently be verified – that during a stint in Copenhagen, he convinced his Danish landlord to knock 1,000 euros (about $1,340) off his rent by making him a coconut fish curry.

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